posted at 11:02 pm on November 12, 2012 by Allahpundit

We were wrong about the effectiveness of President Obama’s turnout mechanism.

The simple fact is Republicans spent more and achieved less than Democrats in 2012…

Some Republican analysts and strategists are rushing around with new explanations of what happened and what we must do.

The fact is less than an a week after the election they don’t know what happened and they can’t possibly know what we should do.

***

The Republican Party — which, by the way lost women to President Obama by 12 points — needs to run away from its archaic stance. Yes, object to abortion. Yes, work to make it rare. But move on: Abortion is here to stay. (And while you’re at it, GOP, it might just be time also to abandon that vaunted “abstinence-only” policy that has been such a dismal failure.)

Second, gay marriage. On this, simply — who cares? America 2012 has enormous problems. Is this really an issue that matters to — anyone? Christians, two men getting married doesn’t affect your marriage in any way. Get over it. The Republicans are on the wrong side of history on this issue, and Mr. Obama swept in millions of young voters by his tolerance. It’s time to walk away.

On both issues, the GOP can make a clean break: As the party of individual freedom, the GOP can simply say it now sees that Americans — especially women — do have the right to choose their own path. In fact, the party espouses the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, always has, so the turnabout won’t even raise an eyebrow.

***

My age group is one pocket of voters who Republicans should be carrying with ease. Youth is all about rebellion and freedom and independence—things the Democratic Party preaches but doesn’t deliver. Behind their clever one-liners lurks a government shackle waiting to be slapped onto the wrists of every young voter they ensnare…

Shame on Republicans for not seizing the opportunity this time around. They could so easily define their brand as the true advocate of rebellion; a “stick it to the government” movement in the spirit of the 1960s hippie wave.

It wouldn’t be a smoke-and-mirrors, bait-and-switch trick either, like what goes on across the aisle. Republicans truly are the party of a less intrusive ruling class. Frame the Republican fundamentals—tax less, spend less—as a fresh populist approach instead of Grandpa’s adage, and the party is back in business.

***

Every time I suggest better, smarter GOP outreach to young people, Hispanics, African Americans, and women, many in the GOP old guard wave their pointer fingers at me and insist that I am advocating pandering, that I am allying myself with the Left’s divide and conquer tactics.

Let me correct them in writing, as I have done in speech: Outreach is not pandering. They are completely different things. I am not talking about dividing the country up into special interest groups, pandering to voting blocs with speeches telling them what they want to hear in order to win votes. What I am talking about is taking the conservative message, a message that stands to benefit everyone in society, to places the GOP often ignores–local African-American and Hispanic church groups, feminist centers, and left-leaning college campuses, to name a few.

Will your message face resistance? Yes, and that’s okay. It gives you a chance to correct false, media-driven stereotypes about conservatives and conservatism. Will you convert the majority in one afternoon? Of course not; these stereotypes have been inculcated over decades. Opening hearts and minds is a process, not a lunch appointment. That doesn’t mean you don’t get to work. Andrew Breitbart understood that better than anyone.

***

The darndest thing is I’m listening to all this handwringing and most of it is coming from a lot of people who’ve never really been conservative or supported conservatism. These people hated our ideas and values when we were winning and now choose this opportunity to sell us out the way they’ve always wanted. The conservative herd is headed off a cliff led by a consultant class that would otherwise now be swimming in pools full of dollar bills like Scrooge McDuck.

These people would have us believe that we must make fundamental changes to draw in new voters. We must exile social conservatives to bring in young people and single women. We must exile fiscal conservatives to bring in hispanic and black voters. With whatever is left from having exiled both, these geniuses would have us believe the Democrats in whose camp these groups already find themselves will just sit back and let it happen.

The Republican Party will never out Democrat the Democrats. Conservatives will never out liberal Liberals. We should not try.

It dodged a bullet because a Romney victory would have obscured deeper trends in American politics the GOP must take into account. A Romney administration would also have been politically cautious and ideologically defensive in a way that rarely serves the party well.

Finally, the GOP dodged ownership of the second great recession, which will inevitably hit when the Federal Reserve can no longer float the economy in pools of free money. When that happens, Barack Obama won’t have George W. Bush to kick around.

So get a grip, Republicans: Our republican experiment in self-government didn’t die last week. But a useful message has been sent to a party that spent too much of the past four years listening intently to echoes of itself. Change the channel for a little while.

***

“If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community,” [Sen.-elect Ted Cruz] said, “in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state.” He ticked off some statistics: in 2004, George W. Bush won forty-four per cent of the Hispanic vote nationally; in 2008, John McCain won just thirty-one per cent. On Tuesday, Romney fared even worse.

“In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat,” he said. “If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party. Our kids and grandkids would study how this used to be a national political party. ‘They had Conventions, they nominated Presidential candidates. They don’t exist anymore.’ ”

***

At the same time, a Republican Party that moves too far leftward on immigration risks alienating its white working-class supporters, an easily disillusioned constituency whose support the party cannot take for granted. These voters already suspect that Republican elites don’t have their interests at heart: Mitt Romney lost last week because he underperformed among minority voters, but also because a large number of working-class whites apparently stayed home. If the party’s only post-2012 adjustment is to embrace amnesty, they aren’t likely to turn out in 2016 either.

What the party really needs, much more than a better identity-politics pitch, is an economic message that would appeal across demographic lines — reaching both downscale white voters turned off by Romney’s Bain Capital background and upwardly mobile Latino voters who don’t relate to the current G.O.P. fixation on upper-bracket tax cuts.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Henry Olsen writes, it should be possible for Republicans to oppose an overweening and intrusive state while still recognizing that “government can give average people a hand up to achieve the American Dream.” It should be possible for the party to reform and streamline government while also addressing middle-class anxieties about wages, health care, education and more.

***

The common theme here is that the current Republican economic message isn’t very compelling to any of these groups. If Republicans addressed that problem, they would find their numbers improving in all of these groups, and outside them too. White, working-class voters, who supported Romney for president but seem to have had low turnout, might have shown up in greater numbers if Republicans had retooled on economics.

Men and women, whites and Hispanics, the young and the middle-aged: All of them want politicians to offer a practical agenda to create jobs, raise wages, and make health care and higher education more affordable. Most of them aren’t wedded to liberal answers on those issues. They will take them over nothing, and that’s what Republicans have been giving them.

Why isn’t soul searching underway on the left? When the personality at the center of the cult leaves the stage in four years, Democrats will own his results without the benefit of his appeal. We can’t know quite what a second Obama term will bring, but if his first term is an indication, there’s little reason to expect his party will be crowing. The fiscal cliff is here but a whole landscape of steep drops comes next: the economic cliff (over which lies a possible double-dip recession), the Obamacare cliff (over which lies an unprecedented bureaucratic behemoth), the Iran cliff (over which lies a nuclear bomb), and so on. A precipice in every direction and a president who’s given us no reason to presume he can steer clear. Have Democrats stopped to wonder what initiatives they’ll have to defend when the dust settles in 2016?…

It is in the nature of personality cults to fail at most things beyond generating and disseminating propaganda. This inability is the result of two things. First, the personality’s popularity is not results-driven. Since adoration hasn’t been earned by achievement but by the advent of charisma, why kill yourself trying to get results. Second, few people are willing to candidly critique the personality at the center of the cult, so there is little chance of course correction. None of this bodes well for Barack Obama. And for the country’s sake, let’s hope it’s wrong.

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It is in the nature of personality cults to fail at most things beyond generating and disseminating propaganda. This inability is the result of two things. First, the personality’s popularity is not results-driven. Since adoration hasn’t been earned by achievement but by the advent of charisma, why kill yourself trying to get results. Second, few people are willing to candidly critique the personality at the center of the cult, so there is little chance of course correction. None of this bodes well for Barack Obama. And for the country’s sake, let’s hope it’s wrong.

you mean ticking off blacks, hispanics, gays, single women and young people didn’t work out for you guys?

But we can rejoice – and I mean rejoice – that the side that won the 2012 election is the weaker side, because it offers no hope, no future, no prospect of the freedom to build and plan as humans are predisposed to: for the joy of hard work rewarded, for our families, for our communities, for prosperity, for posterity.

Lies are eventually exposed, and collectivism is a great lie that has been exposed over and over again. The lie cannot win. An angry obsession with the resentments of the past – which is what motivates Obama’s circle; you’d think none of them had gone outdoors since 1968 – cannot win.

We must exile fiscal conservatives to bring in hispanic and black voters. With whatever is left from having exiled both, these geniuses would have us believe the Democrats in whose camp these groups already find themselves will just sit back and let it happen.

Nobody has said that one must exile fiscal conservatives to bring in Hispanics.

That’s the problem with the two party system — we’ve reflexively been placed into opposition to the Democrats on the matter of immigration.

Once, the Republicans were the party the blacks looked to — our record on civil rights for blacks, even in this day, is far better than the Democrats.

Once, the Republicans were the party of immigrants — we were the ones who opposed the Alien Exclusion Acts and Executive Order 9066.

Tokyo Rose was a Republican, and never gave up on her country — and the Democrats crucified her.

Fast forward to today, and I hear people who claim that individualism is the watchword for Government, but all those illegal aliens have to go. To more opposite positions are hard to imagine.

Well, as I’ve said elsewhere, the children of these illegal immigrants will be citizens, and their children will remember that you drove their parents into the underground economy and stifled their upward mobility. It will take generations to undo the damage the Know Nothings in our party have done. That it can be undone is obvious — for the Democrats managed to sweep all their racist crap under the rug and make their party be the party of choice for the blacks they once demonized.

But it took over a hundred years for the Democrats to make their party the go-to home for blacks. Let’s hope it doesn’t take our party that long to become the home for conservative hispanics.

I was wrong to believe that free men knew they were being threatened by a tyrant in the first place. I had no idea they were thinking about other things. I still can’t figure out what they were thinking about instead.

Well, I’ve been pretty depressed this week. However I think I am ready to fully embrace our new communist overlords. I have begun my own small movement to load up on every benefit this government has to offer. The proceeds of which I will use towards my own purposes…stockpiling and such. Very soon this nation and the rest of the world is going to collapse into mayhem…be prepared is the watchword!

Rush is dead on, as usual. The MSM will never let us be seen as an inclusive party. Look what happened at the GOP Convention. We had diversity coming out of our ears, and the MSM just explained it all away or minimized it. We will never win the PR battle.

Isn’t it amazing all the pundits are now telling the Republicans to become like democrats. Yeah, abortion is here to stay so embrace ripping unborn babies from their mothers’ wombs and killing them, nothing you can do about it. Seems a certain mindset prevailed in Germany during the 20′s and 30′s with the same attitude toward a particular ethnic group.

After a week of thought, here is my list of why we lost and how to fix it:

1) GOP: Stop nominating liberal squishes. Yes, we got on board with Mitt toward the end and he started saying some good things. But really, a former governor from the state of Massachusetts? Really? After five tries, it’s time to finally admit that running to the moderates and liberals while shunning the conservatives does not work. Ford, Bush I (he only won the first time because he still had the aura of Reagan), Dole, McCain, and now Romney are solid evidence that running moderate to liberal Republicans does not work. Stop it. Conservatism wins when it is unabashedly articulated. Reagan — Two landslides. The more moderate W Bush: eked out two wins.

2) The media. The Republican party cannot run a candidate against both the democrat candidate and the main stream media. Agreeing to debates with MSM moderators is just plain silly. You might as well have John F’ing Kerry or Axelrod moderate the debate. Stop agreeing to having a debate on the democrat turf. It makes you look stupid and weak. When pressed next time, simply state that you refuse to accept a moderator from the media arm of the democrat party and that a neutral moderator will be required before a debate will be held. Then stick to it. Take your case to the people by all means necessary. Most of all, start working alternate forms of media; there has got to be a conservative alternative to the media arm of the DNC that is represented by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, AP, Reuters, Time, Newsweak, and the NYT and other MSM outlets. The dems have the media bottled up and nothing you do is going to make those outlets cover Republicans in a fair and unbiased manner. This has to be addressed.

3) Stop rolling over for vote fraud. When you see 90% turnout, have your observers turned away, and see 141% of registered voters turning in ballots — don’t accept the results. Do something about it. Don’t accept rejection of voter ID, go before the American people and make the case that opposition to voter ID is to enable democrat vote fraud. Be vocal, don’t mince words. Go back to paper ballots, the electronic voting machines are demonstrably fraudulent. Have a GOP programmer reviewing every line of code used to count and tally the paper ballots.

4) Education. The NEA and the education complex are the greatest threat to our future because they are indoctrinating our youth. All textbooks have leftwing talking points in them (my son’s spelling book had one of their word exercise sentences: “Sally went to participate in the environmental protest” — this is pervasive). The next thing that will come under attack is both school choice, the ability to send children to other than state schools and the ability to home school. The state education monopoly does not like competition.

you mean ticking off blacks, hispanics, gays, single women and young people didn’t work out for you guys?

shocking

DBear on November 12, 2012 at 11:14 PM

Hmm. Now, what do conservatives — real conservatives — feel in these matters?

a) How did the Republicans tick off blacks? Too many Civil Rights Acts? We lost blacks more due to Democratic advertising of things like “The Southern Strategy” and a pointed phone call from Robert Kennedy. But look at JFK’s civil rights record — and you’ll see that he was a reliable Southern Democrat all the way until he saw a way to grab a few black votes. You wanna see real civil rights, you look at Dwight D. Eisenhower, who integrated the services and who used the power of the Federal Government to batter down doors to black educational opportunity which were being held closed by the Democrats.

b) Hispanics. I’ll give that one to you.

c) Gays. Who cares about them? The blacks? The Hispanics? Having had more than my share of unwanted attention from the gays, I’d be perfectly willing to deal with them from a standpoint of freedom of association — they are free to associate with themselves and whomever else wishes to associate with them, and free to marry, etc., as long as they never ever expect any of us to recognize those marriages in our private dealings, and they never ever force a church which does not condone their activities into any form of relationship with them. Such a position would go far in recognizing the rights of gays to freely associate, and the rights of Christians to freely associate, without either right infringing upon the other. It is the Government which must be made to recognize — again — a private right of association — something which has been lost over the past 50 years.

d) Single women. Well, if a single woman wants the Government to buy their birth control, there’s not much we Republicans can do to change that kind of mind set. After all, if you want smaller Government, and you want that Government to do the moral equivalent of buying you the things you need to exercise your rights, well — I’m still waiting for my giant megaphone and my printing press.

e) young people. Hmm. If you’ve been reading the polls, young people did not break overwhelmingly toward Mr. Obama.

f) Mr. Obama did not win a mandate. Look at the ratio of Obama votes to Romney votes.

Its not all about recrimination, that’s just stupid, we were right about the vehement seething hate emanating from liberals and the power of that seething hate in the press. We weren’t wrong, the cards were stacked against us everywhere the public looked.

Liberals are a pustule on the ass cheek of the world, what treatment is there for puss filled sores?

A lot of good quotes to choose from! i have only to say that most have merit, but it still comes down to actual Conservatism! The days of the Moderates/rinos or eSTAB-Conservatives-in-the-Back repubs are over or the GOP is done for! The eSTAbs can’t be trusted, as their actions to cover for Voter Fraud and Treason by the Left and Benedict Obama specifically, show! The eSTAb repubs can either step aside or watch their base leave them. Their power is lost & their money backers will run, as soon as they see the losses, they’re going to take in the next few elections! Money requires winners.
Fight the Obama Enemy media or Kiss the Constitution Goodbye: http://paratisiusa.blogspot.com/2012/09/an-open-letter-to-those-who-should-know.html?spref=tw

Okay Bishop, if you’re still hanging around, here’s where I start calling Establishment Republicans dumber than a bag of hammers, so you soc-cons don’t feel all singled out:

Did someone slip some choom in your tea and crumpets or something, Establishment dudes?—You don’t and I mean DON’T run the guy the Chicago Mob has been seeing coming for at least the past 4-6 years. Palin had the wit and sense to figure out that she will have less time to get her ground game going than 0bama would have to salt that ground against her. Romney wasn’t as bright, sad to say. And you dimwitted chocks went right along with it out of fear of the Tea Party hoi polloi. That’s winning, Charlie Sheen-style.

Let the bodies hit the floor, y’all. Don’t try to shape and mold a primary four years and a whole lot of stuff happening into the future. That’s just ignorant. You have no idea what will happen, whose star will begin to rise, and whose will fall. But you will give the bad guys at least four years’ warning to wargame their campaign against your unbeatable juggernaut.

Where conservative candidates have had problems, it has been more due to poor candidate selection, not candidates being too conservative. Christine O’Donnell wasn’t too conservative for Delaware, she just couldn’t keep her trap shut in front of Bill Maher’s camera. If you would stop trying to mold and shape primaries in opposition to groups like social cons and the Tea Party, you won’t look untrustworthy when you try and sound the alarm about factually bad candidates. As it stands, the rest of the coalition don’t trust you, nor should they.

There will not be a change made through our”political system”. It will take a violent change of some sort. The political paradigm has been shifted and the system is broken. The checks and do not function as designed. I do not know how it will happen or when but if it does not happen, this country is lost. I tell this to people and I just get a blank stare or they say they say the system will fix it. Human nature is what it is. Tyranny is what it is and always operates the same. We need to kill it in the womb and I fear we may be too late.

1) GOP: Stop nominating liberal squishes. Yes, we got on board with Mitt toward the end and he started saying some good things. But really, a former governor from the state of Massachusetts? Really? After five tries, it’s time to finally admit that running to the moderates and liberals while shunning the conservatives does not work.

AZfederalist on November 12, 2012 at 11:27 PM

The more I think about this the more it makes me mad. Romney was definitely not my first choice but I did in the end vote for him. Now I wonder….what would the election results have been if they had embraced the Tea party?!?

The Republican Party — which, by the way lost women to President Obama by 12 points — needs to run away from its archaic stance. Yes, object to abortion. Yes, work to make it rare. But move on: Abortion is here to stay. (And while you’re at it, GOP, it might just be time also to abandon that vaunted “abstinence-only” policy that has been such a dismal failure.)

I’m sorry, am I missing something? Who in the republican party said they will ban abortion out right? This is nothing but a democrat canard used to demagogue woman into voting democrat.

there’s a lot of stuff there to read. Hopefully the R party can synthesize it

Rs have to become the anti-socailist party. We need to describe it and say why it is bad…and why the large portion of the political/cultural class loves it

this has to be a story of the 150 years of a failed approach to governance…i do think people, individuals, inherently understand liberty…and autocracy. I mean, that is what this country has always been about.

it is seriously remarkable that corrupt sleazy pols have dress up and call themselves progressive…when in fact they are the old Kings and Lords and Czars that people have always hated…unless you were lucky enough to have a benign despot…a kindly King

we need to tell the story of how many countries have gone astray. the PRI of Mexico was finally defeated.

leftists always ridicule Romney, or whoever, but that’s because they are small tin-pot dictators at heart. Dime a dozen really. The great men are all about liberty for all

Republicans want to win again? Do they want a National ticket which doesn’t kill everyone, from all across the political spectrum, down ticket? Don’t nominate Dole/Kemp again. It’s been done it twice and it’s been a disaster both times.